Vanilla

Pure vanilla, with its wonderful aromatic flavor, is the most widely used flavoring in pastries, confections, and other desserts. Vanilla is one of the world's most expensive spice. Growers are known to “brand” their beans with pin pricks before they can be harvested, to identify the owner and prevent theft. Vanilla is native to Mexico, where it is still grown commercially. Vanilla was used by the Aztecs for flavouring their royal drink xocolatl - a mixture of cocoa beans, vanilla and honey. Cortez brought vanilla back to Europe in the sixteenth century, after having observed Montezuma drinking the cocoa concoction. It has many non-culinary uses, including aromatizing perfumes, cigars and liqueurs. Europeans prefer to use the bean, while North Americans usually use the extract. Substances called “vanilla flavour” don’t contain vanilla at all, being synthesized from eugenol (clove oil), waste paper pulp, coal tar or ‘coumarin’, found in the tonka bean, whose use is forbidden in several countries. Today about 70 - 80% of the world's vanilla comes from the islands of Madagascar and Reunion in the Indian Ocean where the plants were first introduced around 1840. Ice cream producers are unlikely to point out that their most popular flavour derives its name from the Latin word vagina. For ancient Romans, vagina meant sheath or scabbard. The Spanish adopted the word as vaina, which developed a diminutive form, vainilla, meaning “little sheath”. The Spanish made this diminutive the name of the plant because its pods resemble sheaths.

Spice Description
Vanilla, is the fruit of a thick green orchid vine (v. planifolia) that grows wild on the edge of the Mexican tropical forests.  The vines, when grown wild, will grow up to the top of tall trees in the jungle. The flavouring comes from the seed pod, or the ‘bean’ of the vanilla plant. The prepared beans are very dark brown, slender, pleated and about 20 cm (8 in) long. The bean is tough and pliable, quality vanilla having a frosting of crystal called givre. The crystals contain the active ingredient ‘vanillin’ that produces the characteristic fragrance and is produced during the process of induced fermentation. These pods are called ‘fine vanilla’. ‘Woody vanilla’ is shorter, lighter coloured, uncrystallized, stronger and slightly bitter. All beans contain thousands of tiny black seeds. Vanilla extract is also available and, if of good quality, is identical in flavour to the pods.

Bouquet: highly fragrant and aromatic
Flavour: rich, full, aromatic and powerful. Madagascar and Mexico making the best quality. Indonesian and Tahitian vanilla is weaker and considered inferior.

Where to Buy Vanilla
Most specialty food shops carry vanilla beans. Look for oily flexible pods. There are a number of places to purchase online, though we recommend purchasing through one of the reputable dealers associated with Amazon and their trusted and secure online ordering. Click here to shop for vanilla beans.

Preparation and Storage
Vanilla extract is made by percolating alcohol and water through chopped, cured beans, somewhat like making coffee. Vanilla extract is very powerful, a few drops sufficing for most uses. Vanilla bean is a bit more time consuming to use than the extract, but imparts the stongest vanilla flavour without the alcohol of extract.

To flavour a liquid base for creme sauces, puddings, ice creams, etc., allow one bean per pint to steep in the liquid by boiling and allowing to cool for an hour before removing the bean. This can be repeated a few times if the bean is washed after use, dried and kept airtight. Ground vanilla can also be used, but use half as much and leave in the liquid. Many recipes call for slitting the bean lengthwise and scraping out the tiny black seeds. Airtight storage is necessary, otherwise the aroma will dissipate. A good way to store whole vanilla is to bury it in sugar. Use a jar with a tight-fitting lid that will hold about a pound of sugar, burying the bean so that no light can reach it. After 2 -3 weeks the sugar tastes of vanilla and can be used in coffee or in other recipes and the bean can be removed for other uses and returned to the sugar after cleaning. Keep topping up the sugar.


Culinary Uses
Vanilla’s mellow fragrance enhances a variety of sweet dishes: puddings, cakes, custards, creams, soufflés and, of course, ice cream. Classic examples include crème caramel, peach Melba and apple Charlotte. Vanilla flavour is detectable in many chocolate and confectionery items and several liqueurs such as Crème de Cacao and Galliano.

Attributed Medicinal Properties
From the time of the Aztecs, vanilla was considered an aphrodisiac. This reputation was much enhanced in 1762 when a German study found that a medication based on vanilla extract cured impotence — all 342 smiling subjects claimed they were cured.
It was also once believed that vanilla was a febrifuge, used to reduce fevers, though it is rarely used for any medicinal purposes other than as a pharmaceutical flavouring.

Plant Description and Cultivation
Vanilla is a tropical climbing orchid, with a long green fleshy stem that sprouts roots that cling to trees parasitically. Its yellow or orange orchidaceous flowers grow in bunches, which bloom one flower each day, opening one by one during the two month season. Vanilla is a tropical crop and cannot grow naturally in temperate climates. When cultivated the vines are trained using posts and support trees.

In nature they are only pollinated by Mexican bees and hummingbirds that are capable of penetrating a tough membrane that separates the plant’s pistol and stamen. European entrepreneurs had transplanted vanilla to grow in other tropical locations but could not get them to produce the pods. It wasn’t until 1836 that a botanist from Belgium, Charles Morren, recognized that the flowers were not being pollinated and would require some human assistance. In 1841, Edmond Albius, a former slave, on the French Island of Réunion, perfected a method to artificially fertilize the short-lived vanilla flower using a thin bamboo skewer to lift the membrane and use his thumb to smear the pollen. This gave great impetus to vanilla bean husbandry, and the method is still used today.

The pods take about nine months to mature and are harvested when the tips begin to turn from yellow. Until recently, the curing process was long and complicated. The beans are first wrapped and subjected to high temperature and humidity to ‘kill’ the vegetative life. The next process involves alternate drying in the sun by day and sweating by night for several days. At this point the beans are dark, oily and pliable and are then slowly dried in the shade for up to two months. They are then sorted and graded and placed in chests for a further conditioning period of one or two months.